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Customer retention Customer success metrics Customer success strategies Churn
rate Customer marketing Scaling customer success

2 January 2024 9 min read


THE UNTAPPED POTENTIAL OF CUSTOMER SUCCESS AS A COMPANY-WIDE MINDSET

Customer-led growth

COURTNEY ELYSE JONES

Read More

 1. Why customer success should be introduced pre-sale
 2. How to incorporate customer success before a sale
    1. Think like a salesperson
 3. Cross-departmental collaboration
    1. Customer success and sales
    2. Customer success and marketing
    3. Customer success and product
 4. Parting thoughts

Having worked in client services for the best part of a decade, I like to think
I have a pretty good idea of what customer success is, and what it isn’t.  

Even in name, customer success is wholly unambiguous about its one mission: To
make customers successful; and to achieve their desired outcomes with the
product or service they’ve bought. This ethos should perforate every corner of
an organization: From product, to marketing to sales. 

But more often than not, the goals of customer success are siloed to its
representative department or team. This can be a head-scratcher for many
reasons. After all, isn’t having successful, loyal customers who repeat
purchases the crux of every business?

In this article, I’ll be discussing how customer success can be incorporated
before the point of purchase, to maximize customer lifetime value, customer
experience, and establish foundations for revenue growth. 

We’ll specifically be looking at:

 * Why customer success should be introduced pre-sales
 * How you can best collaborate with sales, marketing, and product


WHY CUSTOMER SUCCESS SHOULD BE INTRODUCED PRE-SALE

More often than not, customer success is siloed as a post-sales function. This
begs the question: How can customer success – and CS activities – integrate into
all the different departments? 

Viewing customer success as a post-sales function has its limitations. For
example, let’s take the traditional model of customer success: You onboard your
customers; you try to get your customers to engage with your product; you
monitor that engagement; and you identify areas for their account to grow. 

There’s nothing wrong with this model at all. Customer success does these
activities, no doubt about that. In fact, it's the baseline of all successful
customer success functions. But what if you could take it further?

What if we get brought in before the sale is made. What does customer success
look like pre-sales? Does it work? Can it work? (The answer is “yes” to both
questions, FYI!) 


HOW TO INCORPORATE CUSTOMER SUCCESS BEFORE A SALE

The customer success community is full of incredible champions of the CS cause,
helping demonstrate why a value-led, outcomes-based approach to customer
relationship management should be every organization’s number one priority. 

You can take this one step further and argue that customer success should be a
company-wide philosophy, and not just something that can be conveniently
organized into one post-sales department, into one team.

To bring customer success in pre-sale requires organizational buy-in; your CEO
and the rest of the C-suite need to believe in the CS mission wholeheartedly. To
truly iterate the mission of customer success, you want to introduce it as soon
as possible. 

Think of customer success as a selling point for your organization. It’s a
proactive, white-glove treatment that showcases how willing your organization is
to the client’s success. Bringing customer success in on a discovery call with
your salesperson offers a wealth of additional possibilities. 

Being introduced to the client before the sale has taken place (while they’re
still a prospect) gives CS a chance to hit several key targets all in one fell
swoop. If your sales team is on the fence about you joining their discovery
call, remind them that this meeting provides a unique opportunity to: 

 * Consult with your sales team to provide expertise
 * Assess the prospect’s needs thoroughly
 * Share relevant examples from other client solutions
 * Support sales process with expert product knowledge

Why sales skills need to be a part of every CSM’s tookit
I’m going to talk you through some methodologies and best practices to help you
make sales skills part of the customer success toolkit.
Customer Success CollectiveMark Higginson



THINK LIKE A SALESPERSON

For those of us who’ve been in the customer success game a long time, back when
it was more-or-less account management, we tend to say we're undercover
salespeople. I know CS purists may come for me for saying that, but it’s true!
Customer success professionals understand the importance of nurturing accounts
for expansion.

Hear me out: While we're not the ones chasing down the deal, we should still be
sowing the seeds of account expansion in the client’s mind. And a lot of this
comes down to access. Being able to have access to prospects early means that
customer success can add that additional value. 

Salespeople can speak to product capabilities and reference client success
stories. However, the customer success team's proximity to real-world usage
situations positions them to provide richer context around processes. 

By participating in discovery calls, customer success can draw directly from
client feedback to confidently articulate specifics that resonate with
prospects. This granularity stems from their behind-the-scenes understanding
that comes from working closely with the product and portfolio of accounts.

But even if CS isn’t on the discovery call, you can still involve customer
success early on in the process. Early access to prospects facilitates
communicating actual client feedback and explaining processes in granular
detail. With enough time to prepare, customer success can proactively create
customized materials for prospects.


CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL COLLABORATION


CUSTOMER SUCCESS AND SALES

To me, the tag-teaming aspect of this process – bringing together sales and
customer success – combines both team's strengths for mutual benefit. Customer
success provides insight into client needs which helps in contextualizing
product value. 

Sales directly engage prospects while keeping customer success apprised for
crafting tailored solutions. This symbiotic relationship epitomizes why breaking
down departmental silos unlocks an organization’s full potential in ensuring
customer outcomes and experiences.

When brought into the customer journey early on larger accounts, my top priority
has always been understanding what clients hope to achieve with our product.
Participating in these initial discussions provides invaluable insight into the
type and level of support that will be needed down the road. With prospects
clearly conveying their goals upfront, customer success can conduct an early
needs assessment of sorts.

Harmonizing the hustle between sales and customer success: Part 2
In the second installment of our podcast two-parter inspecting the relationship
between customer success and sales, it was our pleasure to chat with Taylor
Hodges of JLL Technologies, about why aligning sales and customer success is
more than just a strategy.
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta


In a prior role, I leveraged some excellent customer personas developed by
marketing to anticipate the care larger prospects would require. I effectively
utilized these five personas as a complementary sales tool to the vital efforts
of account executives.

As the sales team conducted discovery calls, I’d schedule follow-up
consultations and put together a deck summarizing skill gaps needing attention,
strategic recommendations based on the personas, and ideal next steps. 

Of course, I aligned these plans with our Head of Sales regarding the products
they wanted to position. My objective was to provide additional expertise that
advanced conversations and ensured prospects fully grasped solutions tailored to
their needs.

If you want to have a customer-centric organization, one in which CS really is
everybody's responsibility, then bringing in customer success early is
essential. 

Why you should align customer success, marketing and sales
Customer success is preoccupied with nurturing its current customers, rather
than seeking out new customers. While being distinct with different objectives,
there is an intersection between customer success, marketing and sales: they’re
all customer-centric fields.
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta



CUSTOMER SUCCESS AND MARKETING

In the past, I’ve collaborated closely with our marketing team to produce
in-depth case studies of successful client implementations. We spotlight
specific customers and document the business outcomes they achieved using our
product. These studies illustrate the tangible ROI, increased efficiency, higher
production, or other metrics real clients experience.

Beyond individual case studies, we work together to identify broader trends
across our current and target audiences based on particularly effective product
usage behaviors and strategies we observe. These may relate to different client
segments or use cases. Marketing is then able to take these real-world customer
insights and convey the proven success new users can expect by working with us.

The case studies and trends provide concrete proof points marketing leverages
across advertising, the website, sales collateral, and events. They turn the
data and patterns we provide into compelling evidence of achievable results.
This content directly answers prospect questions about what their experience may
look like. The authenticity and transparency stem from marketing and customer
success collaborating to highlight real customer journeys.

The complete guide to customer support, success and product development
“Just input the API key into the POST API field, delete all of the HTML lines
above it, and hit refresh,” the support agent said. “Excuse me, W H A T?” I
hollered into the phone. Doesn’t that sound like every customer service call
EVER?
Customer Success CollectiveLJ Barnum



CUSTOMER SUCCESS AND PRODUCT 

You can’t talk about cross-departmental collaboration without featuring the key
team: product development. Product development actively works with customer
success to understand voice-of-customer-driven needs to enhance the product.

Our collaboration also pinpoints where we’re lacking with our current offerings,
as well as potential gaps in the broader market, enabling us to develop
innovative new products.

With constant user contact, CS teams offer an unparalleled understanding of pain
points and feature needs. This proximity uniquely qualifies them to collect
qualitative and quantitative feedback that truly represents the voice of the
customer.

In particular, CS should funnel inputs from diverse channels into a unified
repository. By logging detailed customer requests, questions around pricing,
struggles with workflow, and more, a clear picture of product weaknesses
emerges. In fact, these insights can pave the way for an entirely new product,
or a whole suite of products if the demand is there.

Customer success has a certain context around use cases and workflows, which
help accurately diagnose where functionality falls short of user needs. Armed
with this granular customer data, the product team can implement targeted
improvements that address friction points and shortcomings. 

Loop closures from CS reinforce that user voices shape progress, increasing
retention and revenue. Involving CS pre-sale puts your finger on the pulse so
you can build an optimal product before issues arise and customers churn.

How to manage the feedback loop
Most companies would agree that customer feedback is the most effective way to
understand your product and the people who are using it day-to-day. However,
what they fail to realize is that collecting that feedback is just the
beginning.
Customer Success CollectiveEmma Bilardi


For example, in a previous role, I took an unused framework that I adapted to be
used as a consultative tool for conducting needs-based analysis for prospective
clients during the nurturing phase of the sales cycle. This helped identify
client-specific gaps that we were able to link to our other products and later
was used to create a brand-new product in and of itself.

But it all started off as a customer-success-specific tool to use in early sales
calls as a direct response to gathered client feedback. That’s the beauty of
collaboration. Customer success was sitting on a resource that was gold dust to
our product (and marketing) team, and had we not pooled together, then we
wouldn’t have expanded our product offerings to cater to the ever-changing new
customer needs.


PARTING THOUGHTS

Essentially, customer success should integrate itself across all departments by
positioning our unique proximity to customers. That’s our hallmark. That’s what
makes our insights so unique. The insights we gather from direct feedback,
experiences, and identified client needs are invaluable sources of knowledge
other teams can't access day-to-day. 

We inject these learnings into other disciplines so outcomes across the board
become more customer-centric. It moves beyond just sales pitching persuasively.
CSMs can tap into the customer segments we’ve defined to deeply understand our
prospects and determine what will resonate. 

By having customer success directly join calls, sales, marketing, product, and
community interactions all become enriched by our on-the-ground expertise. For
the businesses I’ve worked for, having that embedded, integrated approach is
wholly distinctive.


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Written by:

COURTNEY ELYSE JONES

Head of Insights & Client Success at The Alliance.

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